A user interface is a system by which people (users) interact with an electronic device, such as a computer. In general, a user interface allows users to input information to manipulate an electronic device. A user interface also allows an electronic device to output information as to the effects of the manipulation. In computing, a graphical user interface (GUI) is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. A GUI represents the information and actions available to a user through graphical icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation, as opposed to text-based interfaces, typed command labels or text navigation. The actions are usually performed through direct manipulation of the graphical elements.
An electronic form is a type of GUI view that is specifically designed to allow a user to enter data in a structured manner for processing by an electronic device. An electronic form is an electronic version of a physical form, such as a paper document with blank spaces for insertion of required or requested information. An electronic form provides an input template comprising various combinations of checkboxes, radio buttons, form fields, and other GUI elements designed to query and display data.
Electronic forms are typically designed for use in a particular geographic region. For instance, a form designer might design an electronic form with various GUI elements presenting a series of form fields arranged to accept user information. A form field may have a form prompt proximate to the form field to prompt a user to enter certain types of information in the form field, such as a form prompt “Name” next to a form field for entering a user name. The form labels are typically presented in a human language appropriate for a given geographical region. For instance, an electronic form presented to form users in the United States of America (USA) would use form labels presented in the English language.
A potential problem arises, however, when an electronic form designed for one geographic region is presented in a different geographic region. For instance, if an electronic form originally designed in the English language was to be used in a geographic region other than the USA, such as Korea, an administrator or a developer of an application generating a form would need to manually change form prompts from the English language to the Korean language usually by creating another copy of the form. For business class form generators, a team of language specialists may be employed to “localize” an electronic form for a particular geographic region. This manual process is inefficient, expensive, and raises potential security risks. There are some automated localization techniques, although these techniques are typically limited to use at design time rather than run-time of a form generator. Further, automated techniques are typically limited to performing language translations for a form, which can produce unpredictable results depending on a quality of a translation program or algorithm. It is with respect to these and other considerations that the present improvements are needed.